Forest Road Map ― Japan's forest roads on a map: location, length, elevation, municipality

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Search all 14682 listed roads by any part of the name.

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Jump to a region Hokkaido Tohoku Kanto Chubu Kinki Chugoku Shikoku Kyushu

Forest roads were not built for recreational driving

Forest roads exist for forestry and for the people who live along them. Work vehicles, local traffic, walkers and cyclists use them. They are not off-road courses.
If there is a closure sign, a gate or a rope, do not go in. Beyond the risk of collapse and falling rock, every rider who ignores one makes permanent closure more likely.
A line on this map does not mean you may ride it. All we publish is the fact that a forest road exists there.
Collapses, fallen trees and slope failures happen routinely. Check the local authority's closure information before you set out.
Some side tracks leading off a forest road enter private forest. Do not enter without permission.
Forest roads have been closed for good because of noise and litter. Slow down, and leave nothing behind.

About this site

Lines and names come from OpenStreetMap. Prefectures publish the total length of their forest roads as a statistic, but no route list, no location map and no downloadable data (confirmed for Chiba in August 2026). The national spatial data holdings do not appear to carry forest road geometry either. Right now OpenStreetMap is the only openly published, freely usable source.

Municipalities are determined from Geospatial Information Authority of Japan data. We look up which municipality each end of the road falls in. Where a road crosses a boundary, the list shows the municipality at one end only.

What OpenStreetMap almost never records, though, is whether a road is dirt or surfaced. The thing riders most want to know is the thing the public data does not hold.

What we hold to

If we don't have a source and a date, we don't write itEither one missing is enough to leave it out. “Saw it somewhere” gives the reader nothing to check.
We never write “this is passable”Telling you something is closed costs you nothing if we're wrong. Telling you it's fine and being wrong strands you. The risk isn't symmetrical, so neither are we.
No trailhead coordinates, no turn-by-turn directionsForest roads are working roads for forestry and for the people who live along them, and riding areas have neighbours. Places have closed because too many people came. We won't add to that.
No hype, and no rankingsYou won't find “the best one” here. Laying out what you need to decide with is where our job ends.
When we get something wrong, we fix itWhat we haven't verified is marked unconfirmed. What we later find out gets corrected in the open, not quietly deleted.

Search by name

Choose an area

Hokkaido (4 prefectures) No published list here →

Tohoku (6 prefectures) No published list here →

Kanto (7 prefectures) 52 restricted →

Chubu (9 prefectures) 31 restricted →

Kinki (7 prefectures) No published list here →

Chugoku (5 prefectures) No published list here →

Shikoku (4 prefectures) No published list here →

Kyushu (8 prefectures) No published list here →

About this site

What we hold to